Heartfelt

“As a child growing up in the technology generation, computers, cds, and movies had always been facts of my life.  They also consumed much of my life.  I felt for my parents, having been so completely deprived as children without all of the wonders of modern technology.  I could not imagine what their young lives would have been like.  What did you do to entertain yourself?  Yes, I was convinced that life in the olden days must have pretty dull.  I could not even conceive the notion of being able to live happily without technology.Then it happened.  My parents decided to send to a sleep-away camp.  This meant no phones, no cds, no television, no computers, and no modern plumbing.  I was sure that this must have been a cruel joke by my parents, but, two days later, there I was, seven years old, spending my summer at the Colvig Silver Camps in the mountains near Durango, Colorado.

One of my first experiences at Colvig convinced me that nature and I did not go well together.  All of the campers had to take a swimming test, and something tickled my foot as I swam in the brown and boggy lake.  I put my feet down and sank a little, as my toes squished into the muddy bottom.  I saw something swimming in the water, getting closer and closer to me with each second, until finally I saw it.  A school of rainbow fish flowed by, just one of the many “pets” you get used to while at camp.  I, for one, did not want to stick around long enough to get used to them.

We lived in cabins arranged as a ghost town, on either side of a dusty dirt road winding through the pine forest.  The town consisted of five ramshackle cabins, each given the name of an old Western town shop.  I lived in the apothecary.  Each cabin had a metal roof, so every time it would just drizzle outside, it would sound as though we were huddling between two cymbals crashing together.  The worst part of camp also had to do with water – the bathrooms.  There were lots of campers, but only a limited supply of water, so we had a lot of rules about how to use and conserve the water.  We younger campers had to double up in the shower to save water.  Whenever the water ran out, we were the ones who would just have to do without.  The showers were a long, dark walk from our cabins.  We would all walk there, shivering in our towels and then pull straws to determine who had to shower first.

I soon discovered, however, that not everything at camp was actually all that bad.  The open holes in the roof near the edges of the cabins allowed us to wake up to the smell of fresh mountain air and evergreen trees.  We would also go to bed with the smell of the campfire still at our noses, bringing the sweet and sticky taste of the marshmallows back to us.

There were certain chores that were required of each camper, and these were not age discriminate.  Naturally, cleaning the bathrooms had to be one of them, along with setting up and putting away breakfast, and cleaning the dishes.  No matter how many times or how many hours we worked on cleaning that bathroom, it retained its (shall we say) pungent smell that you just had to get used to.

The best chore was to take care of the camp’s animals.  Besides the typical corral full of horses, we also had sheep, chickens, a rooster, and three little pigs, named Bacon, Ham, and Sausage.  The animals were all very feisty – especially the rooster.  We had to feed the chickens and try to slip their eggs out from underneath while trying not to get pecked.  We also had to feed and shampoo the sheep.  They hated being washed, so a visitor might see a very sudsy sheep bolting around the pen, chased by a frantic, sopping wet seven-year old with a hose.  My favorite animals by far were those three pigs.  As soon as I walked up to the pen they would start nibbling on my shoelaces and shoes.  We got to climb into the pen a few times and just roll around and play with them.

After a long day’s hiking, cleaning, and pig-wrestling in the mud, there was nothing better than collapsing onto the bottom bunk of my metal bed.  I would stare up at the silver springs of my friend’s bunk above me, listening to the bed squeak.  With every yelp of the bed springs, I would reflect on the past day and think about what to expect in the days coming up.  I mulled over how simple life was in our ghost town, how the biggest worry I had was catching a fleeing sheep or being pushed into a freezing cold lake.  Then the mail would arrive and bring me back into the everyday world.  All of the movies I was missing and the games on my computer would flash back into my head, and all I could think was “thank God I don’t have to deal with any of those distractions so I can be completely immersed in what really matters.”  From then on, I decided that I did not want to miss my own life while staring at a television screen.

My summer experience at Colvig changed me into an outdoors person, and started me out in exploring the world.  Before my time at camp, I was perfectly happy staying in my bubble at home, swaddled with videos, the internet, and computer games.  Since that first summer at Colvig I have been back twice, and also been a counselor at an outdoors camp in Prescott, Arizona.  I have traveled to the Galapagos, England, and Alaska.  I have swum in the Arctic Circle, hiked and zip-lined through rain forests in Costa Rica, and clambered over the Andes at Machu Pichu in Peru.  One of my great desires in college is to study abroad for at least one semester.  Summer camp at Colvig made me realize my passion for the outdoors and adventures.  Nothing makes me happier than getting far away from the media, technology, and “civilization,” and I owe this discovery to my time at a primitive camp in Colorado.”